"You, my fine Bull, you took great Caesar prisoner?" asked the "horse-dealer" mockingly. "It's too bad I can't proclaim that at the auction. It would make a rare slave of you." I reproached myself for having uttered before that trafficker in human flesh words which resembled a regret or a complaint. Coming back to my first thought, which made me endure patiently the loquacity of the man, I said to him: "When you picked me up where I fell on the battlefield, did you see hard by a war chariot harnessed to four black bulls, with a woman and two children hanging from the pole?" "Did I see them? Did I see them!" exclaimed the "horse-dealer" with a mournful sigh. "Ah, what excellent goods lost! We counted in that chariot eleven young women and girls, all beautiful--oh, beautiful!--worth at least forty or fifty gold sous apiece--but dead. They had all killed themselves. They were no good to anyone." "And in the chariot were there no women nor children still alive?" "Women? No,--alas, no. Not one, to the great loss of the Roman soldiers and myself. But of children, there were, I believe, two or three who had survived the death which those fierce Gallic women, furious as lionesses, wished to inflict upon them." "And where are they?" I exclaimed, thinking of my son and daughter, who were, perhaps, among them, "where are those children? Answer! Answer!" "I told you, my Bull, that I buy only wounded persons; one of my fellows bought the lot of children, and also some other little ones, for they picked up some alive from the other chariots. But what does it matter to you whether or not there are children to sell?" "Because I had a son and a daughter in that chariot," I answered, my heart bursting. "And how old were they?" "The girl was eight, the boy nine." "And your wife?" "If none of those eleven women found in the chariot were living, my wife is dead." "Isn't that too bad--too bad! Your wife had already borne you two children; you four would have made a fine deal. Ah, what a lost treasure!" I repressed a gesture of impotent anger at the scoundrel, and answered: "Yes, they would have billed us as the Bull and the Heifer!" "Surely! And since Caesar is going to distribute much of your depopulated country among his veterans, those who have no reserve prisoners will be under the necessity of buying slaves to cultivate and re-people their parcels of land. You are of that strong rustic race, and consequently I have hopes of getting a good price for you from some new colonist." "Listen to me. I would rather know that my son and daughter were dead, like their mother, than have them saved to be slaves. Nevertheless, since there were found near the chariot some children who had survived--a thing that astonishes me, since the women of Gaul always strike with a firm and sure hand when it is a case of snatching their race from shame--it is possible that my children may be among those found. How can I find out?" "What good will finding out do you?"